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Quick Tip: Merging Notes

Evernote is a great way to collect all your memories in one place. Whether you’re gathering photos related to a new home renovation with the Evernote Web Clipper, collecting meal ideas with Evernote Food, or jotting down plans for a work presentation directly in Evernote, the number of notes on any given topic can add up fast. Often, organizing notes as you collect them isn’t convenient, and copying content from one note into another later can be a pain. Luckily, Evernote for Mac, Evernote for Windows Desktop, and Evernote Web give you an easy way to merge multiple notes into a single one.

Merge notes by following these steps:

Select the notes you want to merge (Command + Click on Mac or Ctrl + Click on PC)

A thumbnail view of the notes with options will appear in the Note Viewer

Click the ‘Merge’ button

All of the selected notes will be merged into a single note. When merging with Evernote for Windows Desktop and via the Web, the title of the new note will be the same as the first note selected. When merging with Evernote for Mac, the title will be the same as the most recently modified note. The remaining note titles will be included in the body of the new note, making it easy to tell where the content originated from. The original notes will be moved to the Trash.

Please keep in mind that notes originally created in other Evernote apps, such as Evernote Food, Evernote Hello or Skitch, will no longer be accessible in those apps once merged. To continue to be able to view the original notes, simply move the original notes from your Trash back into any notebook in your Evernote account.

Rich: your Evernote account comes assigned with an Evernote email address. You can find it in your Account Info. We recommend adding it to your contacts so you can quickly send emails directly to your account.

Unfortunately the merge order (per above “whose title will be the same as the first note selected.”) doesn’t seem to work on the Mac version. I was hoping that Evernote had fixed this, because the Windows version does allow this.

Sorry for the confusion, Dave. On Mac, the notes are merged based on when they were last modified. So the most recently modified note will be the title. Evernote for Windows Desktop and Evernote via the Web merge in the order selected.

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Attachments will be merged along with all of the text, so the new merged note will have the same file attached as the original note. You can also retrieve the original note at any time from your Trash notebook.

Combining several notes into one is a great feature. I have always been a bit confused about in which order the note are combined though. Now I realize that it works great in the web interface (on my mac I’m still on MacOS 10.5. 8 and Evernote 2.3.3, so that’s probably why it seems I can’t influence the order of the notes when combining in the desktop app).

Feature request: Collapsable notes/sections
It would be great if the different notes in the combined note were ”collapsable” sections (with Collapse all / Expand all commands).

Combined notes tend to become long notes that are difficult to navigate and get an overview of. If the note headings in the combined note could be collapsed, you would get a kind of automatic Table of Contents for the combined note.

If the sections could be rearranged that would be even greater!

This is a feature that I would appreciate in single notes as well; I try to keep a note for every project, and being able to collapse/expand sections within a note would make it easier to navgiate the note, and also to focus on specific areas within the note.

Thank you for this tip. I’m making my way through “Evernote for Dummies,” and I’ll attend to this when I get there. Trying to do it right for once. I’ve heard it said that there are those who read the manual and those who mess with buttons. I’m a manual reader, trying to be slow but sure. : )) Well, I’m going slowly, that’s for sure.

I am having some weird merge problems. I’ve tried with Mac and Web. I’m merging two JPG files (the front and back of a sewing pattern). I finally got them to merge so the front of the pattern is first in the merged note, but the thumbnail sometimes correctly shows the front (the first JPG) in the merged file, but sometimes shows the back instead. It seems random. Help!

Evernote, is the best app i’ve come across in a really long time. It gets better everytime I use it.
Coming to the issue at hand, is there a way by which only the contents are merged and title of the notes are skipped during the merge. As it would save me a lot of curation when I try to save text from the pdf i’m reading into a single note in a orderly manner to review later.

THIS! I love this idea and it would make my life so much easier. I have several projects where this feature would work so perfectly (e.g. job search profiles and client correspondence). I know this note was 7 months ago but I hope this idea makes it into a future version.

This indeed!! I need a way to determine order (how about the same order as selected, with the first one selected on top?), and then I’d love to collapse, with the previous titles as section heads. I shouldn’t have to go the Web version to do this!

I just tried it, and it worked great, aside from the fact that it put them in the wrong order, deleted the name I wanted to keep, and I can’t rearrange the attachments inside to the correct chronological order!

Fix these things, please. There is precisely no reason to assume that the user wants the newest on top. It could go either way.

This worked great for me! I did it on the Web version. It merged them in the order from top to bottom that I selected the notes in. So the first note I selected was on the top and the last note I selected was on the bottom of the merged note. Worked great!

The MERGE function is misnamed. It should be called the CONCATENATE function. (It left me cold.)

I just *merged* two notes that were ‘conflicting’ (both were very similar, but had slight differences… therefore EN marked them as notes with ‘conflicting changes’.

Instead of doing a rather sophisticated comparison that showed where there the differences are, and allowing me to intelligently ‘merge’ content into a single, reliable note… the Evernote MERGE function simply CONCATENATED the two notes (put the contents of *both notes* into a *single note*, with no attempt to weed out duplicate information)!! SurPRISE!

This feature is perhaps useful in some cases… but it is NOT useful to intelligently find differences in two notes… and smartly move them into one note, with no duplication of content.

EN still has room to improve the resolution of two versions of the SAME note that have been placed in the Conflicting Changes folder.

The MERGE function is misnamed. It should be called the CONCATENATE function. (It left me cold.)

I just *merged* two notes that were ‘conflicting’ (both were very similar, but had slight differences… therefore EN marked them as notes with ‘conflicting changes’.

Instead of doing a rather sophisticated comparison that showed where there the differences are, and allowing me to intelligently ‘merge’ content into a single, reliable note… the Evernote MERGE function simply CONCATENATED the two notes (put the contents of *both notes* into a *single note*, with no attempt to weed out duplicate information)!! SurPRISE!

This feature is perhaps useful in some cases… but it is NOT useful to intelligently find differences in two notes… and smartly move them into one note, with no duplication of content.

EN still has room to improve the resolution of two versions of the SAME note that have been placed in the Conflicting Changes folder.

(Argh….!!)

If you want to REALLY compare and merge text lines from Conflicting Change notes… use a free tool called WinMerge… if you can, at http://winmerge.org/ after a few hours I had successfully merged 3 notes considered Conflicted (6 files in all)… and my Evernote filing system is now Whole. Yay!!

I really really wish this feature was available for thr IOS platform. I travel the world for months at a time with just an iPad and an iPhone. I really want the merge feature for IOS.. PLEASE PLEASE, I migrsted from DevonThink Pro because of the superior sync features to all platforms on a evernote but I sorely miss the merge organizational tool for IOS

Alex, I find the “merge note” feature pretty amazing, but I work from my desktop and the app on my iPhone. Having to go to the web version to merge notes in the order i want them is a real *iss off! Any chance the ordering feature will be added to the mac versions?